Monday, 28 February 2011

So I spent part of my weekend cataloguing my books - fun, non? Well, fun if you're slightly OCD like me, and enjoy lists and sorting books by categories... I'm probably using the word "fun" in its loosest possible sense there!

One thing I noticed was how many books either had very similar titles or exactly the same title. When starting a book blog or a website we're now advised to head onto the Net and search for other sites with the same name that we've picked, to avoid treading on toes and ruffling feathers. Do book people not do this as well when choosing titles? Or are we at the point with that many books in circulation that we're always going to be reproducing ideas in some fashion? How are titles picked anyhow?

Here are a quick selection of ten titles you should probably be avoiding in the future!

As you can see from the ten titles above, it tends to be the generic terms that pick up multiples. I'm sure there will never be another novel called The Quantum Thief, for instance!

Actually, this is where I wanted to point out that fantasy and science fiction are blazing a trail in terms of unique book titles. Thanks to various made-up worlds or words or concepts, few fantasy titles will have duplicates! I present to you:

There's Entangled by Cat Clarke, Graham Hancock, Barbara Ellen Brink, Chris Salter and Peter Sellars, and a bunch of others. One-word titles are the worst for this, I think. Best Served Cold by Joe Abercrombie is another one that shares its title with a lot of others, or very similar variations.

The great thing about fantasy is you can just make up a place name, like Villjamur, and if you incorporate it into the title you can be fairly sure no-one else will have nabbed it yet.